I was just curious, is there any real advantage of using one or the other? On my computer Poser is very slow, but D|S is very unstable. I don't know which is more annoying. Yes I know I need more RAM. Only have 512 mB.

DAZ Studio has a better OpenGL preview, and it's camera controls are simpler and more intuitive. It can also produce better renders than Poser, depending on the circumstance. There's no reason not to have DS on your computer as well as Poser, but if it came down to a choice between the two - I would pick Poser 6 every time.

I'd have to upgrade my machine to get D|S working so I'll be picking Poser for the forseeable future.

Daz studio cant do as much as poser can. I find the cameras to be slow and clumsy. It cant really render better than poser 5 and 6. You can`t make figures using daz studio or dynamic clothing. There might be a plugin in the future to make figures but it probably wont be free. I agree that you can use poser and daz studio but daz studio wont be as advanced as poser for quite some time.

Tried both, don't like the GUI on DS. I use Poser 6 and even with it's faults I'd still use it over DS. Just my opinion and in no way am I rubbishing DS, it's just not for me! thefixer, poser coord.

Poser 6 for sure, but which ever one you use, you may need to add some RAM anyway. If you have Poser 6, there's really no need for D/S to be installed on your system. D/S is very far behind Poser 6.

I also prefer Poser6, maybe I'm just too used to Poser to adapt to something else, but i jsut can't get "comfortable" using D|S. I do use it however, to load Poser scenes to export into Bryce.

Sounds like a resounding vote in favour of P6. Ok, so I won't bother learning D|S. I just did a quick render in P6 of a Jessi with some Kobubaru hair, and wow. I was very impressed. All I did was use the stock lighting rig and stock props and I achieved results in 10 minutes what would've taken me hours in P5.

DAZ Studio's toon render option is really cool. Try using it with the depth of field option turned on for some odd effects.
It's easier to deal with than Poser's various toon techniques, and in my opionion tends to yield more interesting 2D-ish results. However, that's a "for fun" thing in my book. Not really into toon renders as standard fare.

Poser is by far the more robust app. D|S can't replace it, but D|S does have its own advantages (e.g. very quick renders, which is great for testing new acquisitions that D|S can handle,) so especially given that the base module is free, there are indeed reasons why one might want both on hand.

I used to use Poser 4 with only 512MB RAM. WAY too slow! If you can upgrade to 1 GB of RAM, you'll be glad you did. :-)

Message edited on: 08/04/2005 14:16

Time to chime in again in favor of D|S, as this discussion always starts off heavy in favor of Poser. ;) It really depends if you need Poser's specific features, such as dynamic cloth, face room, etc. If all you need is a renderer, I find DAZ Studio extremely easy to use and more reliable than Poser. For being free, it is a very robust program, contrary to what others may say. I also have 512 RAM and both programs run well for me...could it be that your PC's speed is a bit low? I would think 512 would be enough for fairly complex scenes. Thanks, SnowS

o_O There are many words I could use to describe D|S. "Reliable" isn't one of them.

Does anyone use D|S with a Geforce2 card? I'm stuck with that card for now & D|S just doesn't like it (I'm using the 7.7.7.2 drivers)

I tried D|S last night and I have a 3.6 Ghz P4 and a Radeon x700 with 256 Mb. It was pretty fast, whenever D|S didn't crash. But fast is relative. I'm used to rendering in Bryce, and man, talk about slow. Its not unusual to have renders go over 100 hours.

D/S more reliable then Poser? I've been using Poser for quite some years now. Sure Poser 2 used to crash a lot, Poser 3 was much more stable. Poser 4 was solid, Poser 5 after SR4 rock solid and I can still count the Poser 6 crashes on one hand, but after SR1 I haven't had a single crash at all. I'm using Poser 6 from the beginning and almost every day, up to 5-6 hours in one session. With D/S it's been a different story for me. It managed to crash it on startup already. Once it ran it would crash so regulary that it just wasn't funny anymore. If you can live without P6's great features and are prepated to be frustrated by a lot of crashes, then D/S is the way to go for sure. I'm not touching it again until it's ahead of Poser and taht will most likely be never. By the way the last time I tried D/S was about 2 months ago when DAZ released Bryce 5.5..... what a terrible experience that was.

Does D|S even support animation yet? The version I tried didn't. There wasn't much in D|S that I was very impressed with personally. I liked the 16-bit displacement, but not much else. Perhaps in the future I'll give it another try, but not anytime soon.

512mB RAM for "complex" scenes? Not in my experience. At least with P6. I've never used D|S. In fact, I'd consider 512mB to be barely adequate to boot up the program. Even less to do very much with it.

There's a new build of DS out since a couple days ago. The beta's in the last stages of testing, my guess is we'll have version 1.0 released by summer's end, if not sooner. And yes, IMHO, Poser's better. But Studio's no slouch either, it'll catch up, don't worry. Anyways, one can't complain about the price. ;-)

yup..free is about as cheap as you can get. Download it, if it doesn't work, what're you out on?..;) I just keep forgetting I have it. Also, D|S is supposed to be integrated better with Bryce 5.5

"The beta's in the last stages of testing, my guess is we'll have version 1.0 released by summer's end, if not sooner." DAZ has stated that for over a year now. Honestly I really do doubt that they will ever catch. Why? 1. It's taking DAZ ages to release v1.0 of D/S. They've claimed over a year now that it would be released soon. 2. E-Frontier isn't sitting still either, Poser 7 is already in the making. 3. If I see what little they were able to put into the Bryce 5.5 update in almost a year of working, I do loose faith in DAZ's programming capability.

Attached Link: http://www.daz3d.com/support/tutorial/index.php?id=1263

I don't understand that. I can animate in Daz just fine and the process is the same as it is for Poser. This tutorial might shed some more light on the matter - http://www.daz3d.com/support/tutorial/index.php?id=1263

Incidentally, D|S has never crashed for me. Although the low hard drive space warning when rendering is a pain in the arse. Message edited on: 08/04/2005 16:40

"I don't understand that" It's easy. The build I tried of D|S some time ago did not yet have animation capability. There was no timeline, and no way to keyframe animate. Obviously, they've added it in since then. :-)

Poser 6 is the best, I tried daz studio for a few days and Unistalled it.

"There are many words I could use to describe D|S. "Reliable" isn't one of them." "If you can live without P6's great features and are prepated to be frustrated by a lot of crashes, then D/S is the way to go for sure. " Sorry to hear that it hasn't worked well for you two, although I know by now that any other words either of you would use to describe D|S wouldn't exactly be positive either. It works better for me, what can I say? "In fact, I'd consider 512mB to be barely adequate to boot up the program. Even less to do very much with it. " Hm Xeno, perhaps our ideas of what makes a "complex" scene are different then. :) I have a scene in D|S with two fully morphed V3, two morphed hairstyles, 5 clothing items, a large DAZ background figure, a background image, and 4 lights and although it takes a long time to load the scene, I can work with it pretty well. SnowS

Sorry to hear that it hasn't worked well for you two, although I know by now that any other words either of you would use to describe D|S wouldn't exactly be positive either.

What makes you say that? I usually recommended D|S to people who post here asking about buying Poser. It's free, after all.

But it's still in beta. Calling it reliable is just silly. If it were reliable, it wouldn't still be in beta.

Poser has alot of features. But honestly, I've never tried most of them! Daz Studio is a great application for rendering and in my case, testing out textures for clothing models I make. I use both............but I prefer Daz Studio just because it is so much faster for me to render.

Hm Xeno, perhaps our ideas of what makes a "complex" scene are different then. :) I have a scene in D|S with two fully morphed V3, two morphed hairstyles, 5 clothing items, a large DAZ background figure, a background image, and 4 lights and although it takes a long time to load the scene, I can work with it pretty well.

I tend to do a lot of scenes with 4+ Mil figures, plus clothing, hair, backgrounds, numerous props, rooms, etc.....etc......

I've found that it's a challenge for 2G to handle such a scene (much less 512 meg -- I wouldn't even attempt it). In fact: sometimes it doesn't "handle it". The scene won't render, even after using the various "tricks" to convince Poser to do its job.

"Calling it reliable is just silly. If it were reliable, it wouldn't still be in beta. " True, but P5 was released in far worse shape than D|S is in now. It's just not complete yet. "I tend to do a lot of scenes with 4+ Mil figures, plus clothing, hair, backgrounds, numerous props, rooms" OK, now THAT I wouldn't attempt with 512 MB without breaking it up into separate renders. :) SnowS

I downloaded it, tested it and uninstalled it. No more words I work with Poser5/6

True, but P5 was released in far worse shape than D|S is in now. It's just not complete yet.

What has that got to do with it? No one is going to be buying the original version of Poser 5 now. The two versions of Poser currently being sold, Poser 6 and Poser Artist, are both pretty stable. At least, I don't see many posts like this about them.

I said that because Poser 5 was released as a finished product containing more bugs than D|S does as an admitted beta program. Of course no one is going to be buying the original version of Poser 5 NOW, just as no one will be using a beta version of D|S two years from now when it's had any necessary patches and fixes. As for the post, it is regrettable that it's not working for some people, but others in that thread say that they have not had that problem. There's a whole other large thread there titled "I love DAZ Studio!", so apparently it does work. SnowS

Poser 5 is ancient history, as far as I'm concerned. They were already up to SR3 when I bought it, and it was just as stable as P4/PP for me. Actually, I'm far more irate about the memory bug in P6. But they fixed it, so all is forgiven. :)

I wouldn't recommend D|S for a newbie who already owns Poser 6, which is what this thread is about. If they didn't own Poser, then I would recommend D|S, because it's free, and it's silly to sink a lot of money into something you're not sure you'll even like.

But if you already own Poser, there's no need to do free beta-testing for DAZ. I think there's a tendency for people who are already skilled with software to forget how frustrating it can be when you're a newbie. Someone with a lot of experience will recognize a new bug immediately. But a newbie has no way of knowing if they're doing something wrong, it's supposed to be that way, or it's a bug.

Poser 5 seems to be ancient history to most Poser supporters, seeing what an initial disaster it was. ;) I'm glad they finally were able to fix it, but I held off on buying it because of the release problems and it took so long to get them fixed that I tried and got used to DAZ Studio while waiting. I would probably buy P6 just to be able to make more free content to share if it was a bit more affordable. I'll agree with the rest of your statements though, if you've already purchased Poser 6, you really don't need to try and learn D|S right now. SnowS

Daz studio could still be greatly improved. If they settle their differences with e-frontier and make a poser file export and being able to save poser files to the library would help, too. There is no real reason to not use the poser format files in daz studio, even financial because most of the daz products are already in poser format.

"If they settle their differences with e-frontier and make a poser file export and being able to save poser files to the library would help, too." I've been programming for a number of years (3D application related) and I can tell you that not being able to save as poser file in D/S has nothing to do with a dispute at all. That's a choice DAZ has made. D/S can import poser files, so the programmers can do vica versa too. If you can import it's not to hard to export too. It's the same choice DAZ has made with Bryce 5.5 Even though they've promised to get direct poser import, they've choosen not to and go through D/S instead. DAZ has always ignored poser users, they only want to sell us their content, but do not want to support the apps we use.

I can even see how in the future when D/S perhaps will get a good customer base, DAZ may release D/S only content. Just like they force D/S upon Bryce users.

By the way, I tried edit but did get a strange picture validation error, even though I'm not trying to upload a picture at all.